分类： environment

High in Nepal’s remote Himalayan villages, Pema Tamang’s life was upended once again last week when a towering surge of water, rock and mud ripped through her community. In a stroke of fate, she and her neighbors found safe refuge in a Buddhist stupa that had only been reconstructed 12 months earlier, after being leveled by the devastating 2015 Nepal earthquake. The harrowing escape is just one example of the relentless cycle of disaster now gripping the world’s highest mountain range, driven by accelerating glacial melt tied to climate change.

The catastrophic flash floods on August 26 have left more than 1,000 people dead across Nepal and neighboring China, with thousands more still unaccounted for. Hundreds of those missing are feared trapped inside tunnels at under-construction hydropower projects, where rushing debris and water swept through work sites. The disaster was triggered when a massive block of glacial ice and bedrock collapsed, sending a destructive surge cascading through multiple river systems that cut through the Himalayan slopes.

While scientists caution it is too early to draw a direct causal link between this specific extreme event and anthropogenic global warming, the broader trend is unambiguous. As planetary temperatures rise faster than ever due to the continued burning of fossil fuels, the likelihood of similar catastrophic events increases dramatically — especially across the Himalayas, a region that is warming far faster than the global average.

“Climate change has been playing a large role in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, causing these kinds of complex disasters which have really impacted downstream communities and investments,” explained Saswata Sanyal, a disaster risk resilience specialist based at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu. Sanyal notes the region is now facing a growing pattern of interconnected hazards: rising temperatures melt high-altitude ice, which in turn triggers more frequent rockslides, avalanches, and outburst floods. An avalanche can temporarily block a river before releasing a catastrophic flash flood, while unseasonal heavy rainfall can compound destruction after an initial disaster.

This cycle of back-to-back disasters is already wearing down local communities. Flash floods in the same region of Nepal last year killed nine people and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Across the wider Hindu Kush Himalayan region, a string of deadly events including the 2013 Kedarnath floods, 2021 Chamoli disaster, and 2023 South Lhonak glacial lake outburst flood have killed thousands of people and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in total damage. “People in Nepal were still recovering from last year’s floods, and before they could fully adapt, the next one came,” Sanyal added.

Spanning eight countries across South and Central Asia, the Hindu Kush Himalaya holds the largest volume of ice outside the Earth’s polar regions, and its river systems supply water to nearly 2 billion people across the continent. Data from Sanyal’s intergovernmental climate research group confirms glacial ice loss in the region has accelerated sharply since 2000. Beyond glacial melt, thawing permafrost — long-frozen ground that is now warming — is weakening mountain slopes, increasing the risk of catastrophic collapse.

Analysis of satellite imagery from last week’s collapse confirms a massive block of glacial ice and bedrock plunged into the valley below, generating a wall of mud and water several stories high that traveled for kilometers downstream, wiping out entire communities in its path.

Climate experts warn that for the most at-risk high-altitude communities, adaptation has already reached its limits. In some locations, the frequency and severity of disasters have become so extreme that rebuilding villages and infrastructure is no longer practical, forcing mass relocation of long-standing communities. The crisis also casts new uncertainty over regional development plans focused on building roads, bridges, and hydropower projects to lift local economies.

“The adaptation threshold has been crossed in some areas,” said Manjeet Dhakal, a Nepali climate policy expert and United Nations climate negotiator. Dhakal explained that unlike earthquakes, which often leave property and land salvageable, catastrophic floods can erase entire settlements: they destroy not just homes, but the underlying land, public infrastructure including roads, water grids, schools, and power networks. Going forward, he said, all planned resettlement projects must integrate climate risk assessment from their earliest stages.

Dhakal added that the catastrophic consequences of these disasters can be reduced through targeted action: stricter land-use regulations that bar development in high-risk zones, more rigorous multi-hazard assessments before approving new infrastructure, expanded cross-border disaster monitoring, and more accessible, effective early warning systems.

Even with early warning systems in place, however, gaps remain. Of the 670,000 people who received text alert warnings for the August 26 floods, many were migrant workers or tourists who could not read Nepali, while others dismissed the risk as overstated. Some river monitoring stations were overwhelmed by the surge or washed away entirely before they could transmit updated data. Chanda Lal Chitrakar, a 62-year-old resident of Nuwakot, told the Associated Press he paid little attention to the warning he received, only fleeing uphill when he saw the waters rising.

Experts say warnings need to be more actionable, clearly outlining what steps people should take to get to safety. They also recommend prioritizing development in lower-risk regions, retrofitting existing infrastructure to withstand multiple hazards, and centering Indigenous traditional knowledge of local terrain and disaster patterns in formal planning.

For Nepal and other low-emission Himalayan nations, the disaster underscores a profound climate injustice. Nepal accounts for less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change, yet it faces some of the most severe and frequent impacts. “We should blame those who are responsible for increasing the global temperature, those who have benefited from the fossil fuel economy for such a long time,” Dhakal said. “We can at least use this devastating example as an inspiration to urgently reduce carbon emissions.”

This reporting was produced by the Associated Press, with climate coverage supported by private philanthropic foundations. AP maintains full editorial control over all content, with public transparency standards for philanthropic partnerships available on AP.org.

As India grapples with soaring summer power demand driven by record-breaking heat, a striking contradiction has emerged at the heart of its clean energy transition: the world’s fastest-growing solar market is regularly forced to shut down working renewable capacity even when the nation desperately needs more electricity.

When temperatures peaked across the South Asian giant this year, extended air conditioner use through hotter nights pushed evening power grids to their limits. Yet behind the strain, data shows renewable energy providers were ordered to throttle output, as existing transmission networks lacked the capacity to safely absorb the excess clean electricity being generated. Over the last 15 months alone, India has curtailed nearly 11 terawatt-hours of solar generation, according to analysis from global energy think tank Ember and official government data. To put that volume in perspective, that wasted clean power is enough to supply roughly 10 million average households with electricity for a full year. The waste comes at a time when extreme heat and below-average monsoon rains have driven up demand nationwide, for both home cooling and agricultural groundwater pumping.

As the planet’s most populous country and one of the top global emitters of greenhouse gases, India has made rapid progress expanding renewable energy, particularly utility-scale solar, to decarbonize its power sector. It now boasts more than 300 gigawatts of installed clean energy capacity, accounting for over half of the nation’s total installed electricity capacity. Despite that milestone, coal still generates the majority of India’s electricity, and systemic bottlenecks prevent the country from utilizing all the clean power it can produce. Energy analysts say these bottlenecks represent the next major barrier to India’s goal of becoming a global leader in low-carbon energy growth.

The core barriers fall into three interconnected categories: insufficient long-distance transmission infrastructure, inadequate grid-scale energy storage, and the inflexibility of existing coal-fired power plants that dominate baseload supply. When solar generation peaks in bright midday afternoons, coal units cannot quickly ramp down output to make room for the excess clean power. Unlike natural gas or hydro facilities that can adjust output rapidly, coal plants are engineered for steady operation; ramping them down too quickly compromises operational efficiency, raises costs, and even raises risks of mechanical failure. Vinay Pabba, CEO of Hyderabad-based renewable energy developer Vibrant Energy, describes the challenge of adapting rigid coal infrastructure to variable renewable supply as “like asking an elephant to dance.”

Curtailment does more than waste carbon-free power: it creates direct financial losses for renewable energy developers, who only earn revenue for the electricity they actually deliver to the grid. Geographic concentration has worsened the problem too: nearly half of India’s total solar capacity is located in the western states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, leading to rapid transmission congestion when solar output hits its daily peak. “When solar peaks, usually in the afternoon, there is a limited pipe to evacuate it,” Pabba explained.

Without adequate storage to hold excess solar generation for peak evening demand, India also risks locking in continued reliance on fossil fuels even when cheap clean power is available. “Without enough storage, India risks keeping coal plants running even when cheap renewable power is available,” noted Vibhuti Garg, South Asia director for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

Infrastructure timelines have compounded the gap: utility-scale solar and wind farms can often be completed in as little as two years, but new long-distance transmission lines require a minimum of three years of planning, permitting and construction. Ember research finds that India has only hit roughly 80% of its annual transmission construction targets over the past five years, leaving a growing backlog of grid expansion that cannot keep pace with new renewable capacity.

Policy experts have proposed near-term fixes to ease the strain, including spreading new renewable development more evenly across different regions of India, and increasing investment in smaller distributed solar projects and onshore wind to balance output across the day. Even with these adjustments, analysts warn the challenge will grow more acute as India continues its rapid buildout of clean capacity.

India has set ambitious decarbonization targets: the country aims to reach 500 gigawatts of total clean energy capacity by 2030, and policymakers project that non-fossil fuels will account for nearly 70% of total installed power capacity by 2036. To meet these goals without continued waste and grid instability, energy leaders say expanded grid-scale energy storage will be a critical piece of the puzzle.

Batteries allow grid operators to store surplus solar electricity generated during sunny afternoon hours, then discharge that power after sunset when demand remains high but solar output drops to zero. A recent study from the University of California, Berkeley’s India Energy and Climate Center found that renewable power paired with battery storage can match the reliability of conventional coal-fired power, at a lower cost than building new coal plants. Despite that cost advantage, India’s current storage sector remains a fraction of the size needed to meet 2030 targets. As of July this year, India had only 3 gigawatts of operational battery storage and 7.4 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage, with national projected storage demand expected to hit 74 gigawatts by 2032.

“If we try to increase the solar installations without solving for energy storage, it is only going to lead to curtailment,” said Ankit Mittal, CEO of Indian battery storage firm Ingro Energy. Mittal noted that India is navigating an unprecedented, compressed energy transition, with decades-worth of transformation compressed into just a few years as power demand surges from growing electrification of transportation, industry and data centers.

Avinash Rao, CEO of leading Indian renewable developer Mahindra Susten, warned that delayed investment in high-capacity energy storage creates dual risks: it adds operational instability to the national grid and slows progress toward India’s national climate and energy transition targets. Ember analyst Neshwin Rodrigues noted that batteries have a key advantage over large transmission projects: they can be built far faster, making them one of the quickest solutions to ease immediate curtailment pressures.

Across the industry, stakeholders agree that the current crunch was largely unforeseen. Few expected the explosive growth in power demand that has come alongside rapid electrification of new sectors across India. “None of us saw it coming. If we had seen it coming, we would have probably planned our way around it,” Pabba said.

The ongoing Iran war has sent shockwaves through the global aluminum market, disrupting regional supply chains and opening an unexpected window of opportunity for resource-rich Indonesia to dramatically scale up its production of the ubiquitous industrial metal. But the Southeast Asian nation’s ambitious expansion plan, powered almost entirely by newly built coal-fired facilities, stands in direct contradiction to global and national pledges to cut carbon emissions and curb the worst effects of climate change.

Aluminum, a lightweight silver metal used in everything from consumer packaging and power transmission infrastructure to smartphones and electric vehicles, has long relied on the Middle East for roughly 9% of global annual output. Commodities analytics firm Fastmarkets projects that regional production will plummet by 44% this year compared to pre-conflict 2025 levels, driven by widespread energy shortages, Iranian strikes that damaged key industrial facilities in Bahrain, and production cuts across major producers including Qatar Aluminium Ltd. Emirates Global Aluminium has even been forced to exit existing supply deals amid persistent energy instability.

This supply shock has sent global aluminum prices swinging: prior to the outbreak of the war, a metric ton of aluminum traded between $3,150 and $3,250, peaking at $3,780 per metric ton in June before settling at around $3,400 in recent trading. Andy Farida of Fastmarkets explained that the uncertainty around Middle Eastern supply has forced industrial end-users to seek alternative sources, accelerating a global shift in aluminum production that has catapulted Indonesia into a new role as a major global supplier. “When that supply is so unsure, end users look for alternatives,” Farida said. “The war has really accelerated this transformation and put Indonesia on the map.”

Indonesia’s expansion targets are aggressive: according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), a Finland-based non-profit research organization, the country aims to quadruple its alumina output to 32.5 million metric tons by the end of the decade, and ramp up primary aluminum production from roughly 1 million metric tons in 2025 to 14.5 million metric tons by 2030. Unlike many decarbonization-focused production projects, however, nearly all new Indonesian smelters will be powered by dedicated off-grid coal-fired power plants, referred to as “captive coal” facilities. CREA is currently tracking 32 planned captive coal projects exclusively built to power aluminum smelters, most of which are developed by private companies.

Syahdiva Moezbar, a Jakarta-based researcher with CREA, noted that there is a striking lack of public emissions data for these facilities, creating a largely unmonitored expansion of highly polluting energy infrastructure. “This captive coal boom all over Indonesia is essentially not tracked. That is why it’s very concerning,” Moezbar said. The plan directly contradicts Indonesia’s existing international pledges to phase out coal, the most carbon-intensive major fossil fuel and a leading driver of global warming. It also mirrors the environmental tradeoffs already seen in Indonesia’s rapid expansion of its nickel industry, where widespread deforestation and ecosystem degradation have been traded for rapid industrial growth.

The global aluminum industry already accounts for roughly 2% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions, equal to around 1.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year — more than the total annual emissions of most entire countries, according to the World Economic Forum. Even more concerning, CREA estimates that if all planned Indonesian projects come online by 2030, the country’s domestic bauxite ore reserves, the core raw material for aluminum production, will be depleted in less than 12 years.

Indonesia’s aluminum boom would not be possible without major Chinese investment. CREA data shows Chinese firms have already poured between $5.5 billion and $6 billion into Indonesia’s aluminum sector, with total investment projected to surge to $30 billion by 2030. Putra Adhiguna, a researcher with the Jakarta-based Energy Shift Institute, explained that Chinese investment flows follow a decade-old policy shift: after Beijing imposed a domestic cap on aluminum production in 2017 to curb overcapacity and cut domestic pollution, Chinese firms began shifting high-emission smelting operations to countries with looser environmental regulations, including Indonesia.

Indonesia classifies aluminum and nickel as “transition minerals” due to their widespread use in clean energy technologies such as electric vehicle batteries and solar panels. This classification creates a critical regulatory loophole that allows coal-powered production projects to be framed as consistent with global climate commitments — even despite Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2021 pledge to halt public funding for overseas coal-fired power projects. Binbin Mariana, a policy analyst with environmental advocacy group Market Forces, called this loophole extraordinarily large, saying the framing of coal-powered aluminum as a green product amounts to blatant greenwashing. “It is a huge loophole, an elephant can go through the loophole,” Mariana said. “You say it’s a green product, but it is powered by coal… That’s definitely greenwashing.”

While aluminum smelting can run on lower-emission energy sources such as hydropower, building that renewable infrastructure would require more time and larger upfront investment. Adhiguna said Indonesia has chosen to prioritize speed to capitalize on the supply opportunity created by the Iran war, and that rush to develop is the root of much of the environmental and social risk. “The speed factor is really what is causing the havoc,” Adhiguna said. “This is really running against the grain, against the spirit, of the commitment to the climate movement.”

Muhammad Al Amin, a senior official with WALHI, Indonesia’s largest environmental advocacy nonprofit, warned that expanding captive coal capacity for aluminum will worsen the toxic seasonal haze that regularly blankets major Southeast Asian cities including Jakarta. WALHI has already led campaigns against coal expansion on Sulawesi, the island at the center of Indonesia’s nickel production boom, where local communities have already reported widespread health and livelihood impacts from coal-powered industrial development. “If companies want to expand captive coal to aluminum, I think it is very bad news and a very bad development,” Al Amin said. “We have seen it, we have felt it — how communities suffer from the captive coal impact.”

Across the rainforests of Borneo, an ecological disaster is unfolding as rampant wildfires sweep through one of the only remaining habitats of the critically endangered Bornean orangutan. Indonesia, the nation that hosts the vast majority of Borneo’s old-growth rainforest, is currently battling a wave of uncontrolled blazes that have already torn through thousands of hectares of native forest.

For the island’s orangutan population, the damage extends far beyond immediate loss of life from the fires themselves. Hundreds of the great apes have already seen their natural territories turned to ash, destroying the food sources, shelter, and social structures that the species depends on for long-term survival.

Conservation scientists have warned that this new wave of habitat destruction comes at a moment when Bornean orangutans were already struggling to recover from decades of deforestation driven by logging, palm oil expansion, and previous fire events. With fewer than 100,000 orangutans left in the wild globally, every hectare of lost habitat and every displaced individual pushes the species closer to permanent extinction.

The fires, which are often intentionally set to clear land for agricultural development, have been exacerbated in recent years by longer, hotter dry seasons linked to human-caused climate change. This combination of land clearing and changing weather patterns has created a vicious cycle that increasingly threatens not just orangutans, but the entire unique Borneo rainforest ecosystem, which supports thousands of other endemic plant and animal species.

As record-breaking heat waves sweep across nearly every continent amid accelerating global warming, air conditioning has emerged as a critical life-saving technology — but it also carries a steep environmental cost that deepens the climate crisis it helps people survive, leading climate and public health experts warn. A new peer-reviewed study published in *Nature Health* on Monday quantifies both the life-saving benefits and growing climate risks of widespread cooling use, offering a data-backed look at this urgent global dilemma.

Led by senior author Kai Chen, an epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health, the research analyzed more than 30 million U.S. death records collected between 2010 and 2020, pairing county-level data on dangerous heat exposure with mortality outcomes to calculate air conditioning’s impact. The study found that cooling systems saved an average of 5,267 American lives each year over the 11-year period, with a total of nearly 58,000 lives saved across the decade. The largest number of lives saved were recorded in warm southern U.S. states including Arizona, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, while northern states from Washington to Maine saw fewer than 10 lives saved annually due to less frequent extreme heat.

United Nations officials estimate that extreme heat kills roughly half a million people globally each year, and demand for cooling is skyrocketing as average global temperatures climb. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows the number of “cooling degree days” — a metric measuring how much energy is required to cool indoor spaces during hot weather — has risen 28% in the U.S. since 1990, with 2024 setting an all-time record and 2026 on pace to exceed that mark. Across Europe, cooling degree days have more than doubled since 1990, pushing air conditioning adoption up 44%. The trend is even starker in other major warm regions: cooling use has tripled in India and more than doubled across Southeast Asia, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The IEA and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) project global electricity demand from cooling will triple by mid-century.

This growing demand creates a dangerous feedback loop, experts explain: roughly 90% of the electricity powering today’s air conditioning systems comes from burning fossil fuels, which release heat-trapping greenhouse gases that warm the planet further. The UN projects that greenhouse gas emissions from air conditioning will jump from 4.5 billion metric tons annually to 7.2 billion metric tons over the next 25 years — an amount nearly equal to the total current carbon emissions of the United States and European Union combined.

“Everyone knows air conditioning works, but from a climate change perspective, it is not an ideal solution,” Chen explained. “It leads to more carbon emissions … then it accelerates the climate warming problem.” Beyond greenhouse gas emissions, cooling systems also amplify the urban heat island effect by expelling waste heat directly into outdoor city environments, and increased power demand worsens conventional soot and smog air pollution that harms public health.

Chen’s study also highlights widespread overuse of cooling in many developed regions, particularly in commercial buildings. Chen noted that many office spaces are cooled to such low temperatures that workers often wear sweaters even during the hottest summer months, and more than half of the cooling use examined in the study qualified as unnecessary overconsumption. The research confirms that excess cooling beyond a reasonable threshold does not save additional lives, but only increases carbon emissions and accelerates climate change. Chen recommends setting indoor cooling temperatures no lower than 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 degrees Celsius) as a reasonable balance between comfort and sustainability.

A 2020s global energy crunch, exacerbated by geopolitical conflict, has already pushed multiple nations to implement cooling regulations to cut energy use and emissions. Eight countries including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Jordan, Malaysia, the Philippines, the Seychelles, Singapore and Sri Lanka have enforced maximum cooling limits for office air conditioning, and some have even mandated full cooling shutdowns one day per week in public buildings. India proposed similar national cooling limits in 2025.

The issue also carries profound equity implications, experts emphasize: many of the world’s most vulnerable low-income communities lack consistent access to affordable air conditioning, even as they face the worst impacts of rising heat. UNEP’s chief heat officer Eleni Myrivili notes that in recent extreme heat waves, many low-income families have been forced to choose between paying for life-saving medication and running their cooling systems. “In a warming world, thermal comfort should not be a luxury,” Myrivili said. “It’s becoming a prerequisite for health, dignity and increasingly survival.”

Global policymakers and experts from 75 countries and 250 cities are now working to navigate this tightrope: expanding access to life-saving cooling for vulnerable communities without worsening climate change. Delegates will gather in Singapore this September for the Global Cooling Pledge conference to coordinate collaborative action on sustainable cooling solutions.

Experts point to comprehensive policy approaches that combine passive cooling strategies and energy-efficient technology to cut emissions while expanding access. UNEP cooling unit head Lily Riahi highlighted Singapore as a leading model for integrated cooling action. The city-state has implemented a sweeping national strategy that combines passive cooling measures such as expanded urban greenery, which reduces ambient urban temperatures and cuts annual energy costs by an estimated $35 million, with mandatory energy-efficiency standards for cooling and ventilation systems in both new and existing buildings. The approach has lowered local outdoor temperatures by up to 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) in some areas, Riahi said.

Riahi noted that passive, nature-based solutions are sufficient for many mild heat conditions, but extreme, humid heat events still require active air conditioning to protect public health. Experts emphasize the ultimate solution will require shifting cooling energy demand to renewable energy sources and rolling out highly efficient cooling technology to break the link between increased cooling access and rising carbon emissions. The goal, Riahi said, is not less cooling overall, but “smarter and more equitable cooling” that protects both human life and the global climate.

In the flood-scorched hills of central Nepal’s Dhading district, crews are currently digging through layers of thick sludge to reach a submerged hydropower plant, a critical energy facility that keeps the lights on for more than 20,000 local residents. As workers clear debris from equipment buried when last week’s devastating flood surged off the mountains, disaster and climate experts are pushing for a fundamental shift: instead of simply rebuilding the facility in the same vulnerable riverside spot that led to its destruction, Nepal must prioritize long-term climate resilience when reconstructing its damaged infrastructure. The scale of the devastation stretches far beyond this single power station. Across Nepal, catastrophic floodwaters and landslides have left as many as 900 workers missing from a dozen active and under-construction hydropower projects, the Independent Power Producers’ Association Nepal reports, with hundreds of those workers believed to be trapped inside project tunnels. Combined, the disaster has claimed more than 900 lives across Nepal and southern China, with another 4,700 people still unaccounted for. For Nepal’s energy sector alone, the damage has taken an estimated 700 megawatts of generation capacity offline – roughly 10 percent of the country’s total available power. Beyond energy infrastructure, tens of kilometers of roads, dozens of bridges, and hundreds of critical public facilities including schools and hospitals have been destroyed or heavily damaged. As Nepal’s government shifts from immediate rescue and response to long-term recovery planning, experts say the top priority must be avoiding the mistakes that left the country so exposed to this disaster. “Authorities have to take a hard look in the mirror now and ask how they will be rebuilding in these places. They will also have to take a close look at other projects in Nepal that have not been built yet, whether they’ll be approved after this event,” said Jakob Steiner, a geoscientist from the University of Graz in Austria currently based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Hydropower projects across the worst-hit districts of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Dhading have been fully or partially destroyed, a blow that hits particularly hard because hydropower forms the backbone of Nepal’s national electricity grid, serves as a core driver of economic growth, and generates critical export revenue for the low-income Himalayan nation. Most of Nepal’s untapped hydropower potential falls into the run-of-river category, meaning facilities are built directly alongside steep, narrow river corridors where land is scarce and flood and landslide risks can escalate in a matter of minutes. Many workers who are now missing took shelter in the projects’ large access and water diversion tunnels – structures big enough to accommodate full-sized trucks – when the flood hit, but have been unable to escape as debris blocked exit routes. Experts are calling for a complete rethinking of how Nepal plans its infrastructure, arguing that reconstruction should not just replace destroyed assets, but build systems that can absorb and recover from future climate-driven disasters. Ramraj Narasimhan, senior director at the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, says the goal should not be to make every single structure completely indestructible, but rather to build redundancy into critical systems to keep essential services running even when damage occurs. “If it gets damaged, let it get damaged, but can we build in redundancy in the system?” Narasimhan explained. That approach can mean a range of adjustments from selecting safer construction sites away from high-hazard river bends and unstable slopes, to adding alternate transportation routes, backup power generation, improved early warning systems, and risk-mitigation tools like disaster insurance to speed up recovery after an event. Risk assessments must also account for how a single infrastructure failure can cut off access for multiple isolated mountain communities, experts say. These changes are long overdue: the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure estimates that $124 billion worth of Nepal’s existing infrastructure is exposed to climate-driven disasters, leading to an average of nearly $760 million in annual disaster losses. The country’s national disaster response fund, however, holds only a tiny fraction of that amount, leaving it ill-equipped to handle major catastrophic events like the recent flood. Climate scientists warn that risks across the Himalayan region are growing faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, driven by human-caused global warming. Glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya are losing ice at an accelerating rate, while permafrost degradation, unstable mountain slopes, growing glacial lake outburst risks, and increasingly erratic monsoon rainfall are all combining to raise the frequency and severity of catastrophic floods, landslides, and debris flows, according to the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, a Kathmandu-based climate research organization. For extreme events as large as the recent flood, even the most robust physical flood defenses are often overwhelmed, making early warning systems the most critical tool to protect human life, Steiner noted. In this case, the flood was detected at the China-Nepal border soon after it formed, but it moved so rapidly downriver that communities and workers upstream had little to no warning. There was, however, a gap of time between detection and the flood reaching downstream hydropower sites, raising urgent questions about why warnings were not issued faster to alert workers at risk. The disaster is expected to spark heightened scrutiny of future hydropower project approvals, with advocates calling for more rigorous, site-specific environmental, social, and disaster risk assessments, paired with stronger land-use regulations and accountability for project developers. Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, warns that large hydropower infrastructure can itself worsen downstream damage, acting as a “force multiplier” for disaster when large structures, construction debris, and altered river channels amplify the force of floodwaters. Thakkar argues that Nepal should diversify its energy mix to include more decentralized solar power generation, which carries far lower climate risk in the mountainous Himalayan landscape. As Nepal begins the long process of recovery, the question facing the country is not just how fast it can rebuild what was lost – but whether it will choose to rebuild those assets in harm’s way, ahead of the next inevitable climate-driven flood.

Indonesia’s Mount Sinabung, one of the country’s more than 120 active volcanoes, erupted on Monday, sending a massive 3,500-meter column of dark ash and thick smoke billowing into the sky above the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

In the immediate hours after the eruption, authorities reported no fatalities, injuries, mandatory mass evacuations, or disruptions to commercial air travel in the surrounding region. Despite the lack of early harm, disaster management officials issued urgent warnings, ordering residents, casual visitors and traveling tourists to avoid all activities in nearby Karo district villages, as well as any area within a 6-kilometer radius of the volcano’s 2,460-meter summit.

Gray volcanic ash has blanketed roads, parked vehicles, and residential and public buildings across multiple affected villages in Karo, leaving local infrastructure and communities coated in fine grit. In response, local disaster response teams have distributed free protective face masks to local residents to help prevent respiratory irritation from ash inhalation.

Following the eruption, Indonesia’s Geological Agency raised the official volcanic activity alert level for Mount Sinabung to “Watch,” the second-highest warning tier in the country’s volcanic monitoring system. The alert upgrade also came with an expansion of the marked safe zone surrounding the peak, extending the exclusion area for civilian activity.

In an official public statement released Monday, Lana Saria, head of the Indonesian Geological Agency, described this week’s eruption as an initial explosive event, warning that far larger, more hazardous eruptions could follow in the coming days or weeks.

The Geological Agency first detected signs of accelerating volcanic activity at Mount Sinabung in mid-August, when monitoring equipment recorded dozens of tectonic earthquakes around the peak and observed visible changes in volcanic activity. Even before Monday’s eruption, officials had already expanded the recommended exclusion radius to restrict non-essential public access to the area.

Over the past decade of repeated volcanic activity at Mount Sinabung, nearly 30,000 local residents have been permanently displaced from their homes surrounding the volcano, forced to resettle in safer areas outside the high-risk zone.

Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago nation home to more than 280 million people, sits along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a geologically active belt of volcanoes and tectonic fault lines that wraps around the entire Pacific Basin. This location makes the country extremely prone to frequent seismic and volcanic events, with dozens of active peaks monitored constantly for signs of dangerous activity.